Chemicals

DIY: Make your own Soda Ash cheaply

melev — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 04:18:02 +0000

DIY: Make your own Soda Ash cheaply melev Mon, 06/29/2020 - 07:18

You can buy baking soda anywhere. Supermarkets, Walmart, even the Dollar Store. A box costs $0.99 and is perfectly safe for your reef. Baking Soda is sodium bicarbonate which can be used for baking, cleaning, and deodorizing. And we hobbyists use it to buffer the alkalinity level of our aquariums, too.

Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) will raise alkalinity while depressing pH, while Sodium carbonate (Soda Ash) will raise both. By baking the baking soda in your oven, the heat will drive off the trapped CO2 in the powder that would decrease pH levels and turn it into sodium carbonate. We want to use Soda Ash, and making your own is easy and inexpensive. You can use Arm & Hammer, or any other brand sold where groceries are available. Here's one I bought at Aldi. Spead the contents of the box evenly on a pizza / cookie sheet.

Preheat your oven to 300°F, and wait for the oven light to turn off.

Once the light turns off, the oven is at the proper temperature. Don't put the tray in the oven until the temperature has been reached first, so you don't burn the product while the oven is heating up.

Place it on the rack in the middle of the oven.

Set the timer for 60 minutes. Let it bake. No reason to open the oven during this process. Once the timer chimes, remove the pan and allow it to cool off.

It should still be white. If you burned it and it turned brown, toss it out and make a new batch.

Once cooled, transfer the soda ash into a storage container, like this disposable Ziploc one.

How to use it:

If you want to mix up a gallon of alkalinity liquid solution for daily dosing, combine 1 gallon of RODI water with 2 cups of soda ash. Stir it very well for 30 seconds, then give it a few minutes to mix. Once clear, it's ready to hook up to a dosing pump.

You can also make smaller amounts for quick adjustments. For example, if you mixed up a batch of new saltwater and the pH or alkalinity is low, a couple of teaspoons of soda ash mixed in a cup of RODI water may be just the amount necessary to make that saltwater batch measure correctly. You can fine-tune what you need, just experiment and test thoroughy until you have learned what amount works best for you. Also, just cause you mixed up a cup of soda ash and water doesn't mean you have to pour it all into your barrel. Pour in a little bit, let it mix into the saltwater, and measure alkalinity or pH. Add a little bit more, mix and test until you hit the desired level.

Remember: Alkalinity should always be dosed in an area of high flow, trickled in very slowly rather than being dumped in all at once.

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Something old, something new

melev — Mon, 27 May 2019 16:01:28 +0000

Something old, something new melev Mon, 05/27/2019 - 19:01

Years ago, our club's president handed me a coral dip sample from Fauna Marin. Turned out to be gold in a vial but I couldn't get more of it. I remember it working so well, but I figured it must have been a one-time thing that picked up zero traction and never made it to market. Fast forward a decade or more, I stumbled upon one of those vials in my massive aquarium-related stash of things. I was in cleaning-mode and threw out a lot of stuff that I'd been hoarding far too long, due to my "what if I need this some day?" mentality. Admittedly, I do that a lot. And it has come in handy dozens of times, but at the same time the clutter gets pretty bad.

Two weeks ago I was speaking in Minnesota. Another speaker delved into water parameters and caught my attention when he got to Potassium. Potassium was a big deal back when people were dosing the Zeovit line of products. I'd even bought a K test kit to see what my level was, but found it to be nearly impossible to read and shelved it... which I actually threw away last week. That kit was ancient, thus useless. Back to the point the speaker made though, he said K should measure around 400ppm or so. I looked at my previous blog with my ICP Analysis report, which showed that the tank was measuring 340ppm -- considerably low. I made a mental note to focus on that. Later that evening I grabbed dinner with the speaker and we chatted about Potassium, where he strongly urged me to raise the level. He felt that it really helped with coral coloration. So it was something I probably needed to take care of...

Last weekend, I flew to Ft Myers, Florida to speak to SWFMAS. Afterwards I met up with the national rep for Fauna Marin, and she offered to take me to the warehouse. I asked about the old coral dip elixer even though I knew it was a long shot. Turns out they did bottle it up and had it in stock, as well as a newer recipe. So I got both bottles. I also asked if they offered Potassium, which I'm hoping to start dosing -- as well as a test kit to measure my levels. They had those as well. I got my goodies, and headed home. :)

I'm going to read up on the K product on the Fauna Marin website because I was told their instructions on their website is more detailed than what you can read on the bottle. The plan is to use a Kamoer x1 pump to automatically dose it daily. And finally, I need to try out their test kit and see how well it works.

To be continued.

Reef Blog

Phosban-L, a new Lanthanum chloride product

melev — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 11:48:44 +0000

Phosban-L, a new Lanthanum chloride product melev Tue, 11/27/2018 - 14:48

I've never been one to shy away from Lanthanum chloride, a product used in our hobby to bind up and export phosphate from a reef tank. Not only did I feel like I'd found the magic elixir the first time I used some, I've been a huge advocate for more than a decade. Two months ago at MACNA, Two Little Fishies introduced their version to the attendees named Phosban-L. Phosban has been a powdered version of GFO for a long time, used in a Phosban Reactor or similar device. Phosban-L is not just a liquid additive, it's a bottle of concentrated Lanthanum chloride. This isn't really a product review, it's more about my thoughts on this topic.

I've been using it now for a few sessions and have enjoyed the same excellent results as I have with other similar products such as Phosbuster Pro (by CaribSea) and Phosphate Rx (by BlueLife USA). You have to mix Phosban-L with RODI water to create a solution you will drip into your system. I've seen and heard heavy warnings about using it very very very slowly, dripping it into a super fine micron sock. The finest micron available at this time that I'm familiar with is a 10 micron sock. In comparison, the average filter sock is 100m to 200m, so you must seek out a 10m sock when dosing this product. And when they say very slowly, they mean it. "It should be dripped ever so slowly into a filter sock" over a period of DAYS, not minutes, not hours. That's exceedingly cautious to me, but then again any time anyone utters the word Lanthanum, people seem to come out of the woodwork stating how careful you need to be. I'm not saying they are wrong, but they are never referring to Phosphate Rx -- because I've asked them to be specific about what they are talking about.

That being said, I'm not nearly that cautious with this product as they are directing. Perhaps being a 20-year hobbyist that has used some form of Lanthanum since 2005 until now has erased any concern, not to mention how many times my livestock has been exposed to it without any socks to trap it whatsoever. Let's say I used a product every 10 weeks; that's five times a year. 5 treatments x 13 years is 65 sessions, and I'd say realistically I've probably used it more like 75 times. The bulk of those (at least 60) dosings were done using Phosphate Rx, because I just love that product. You don't need a reactor, nor deal with all the steps involved with utilizing GFO. You simply drip it into the skimmer section of your sump or right into the display, and a few hours later the water is clear and the PO4 has been exported by a protein skimmer.

About 18 months ago, BlueLife started selling 10 micron socks. Since I'd dosed for over 10 years without using one, I asked what the reason for this was. Primarily it was for safety concerns, but to me the benefit is help avoid the cloud in the display tank in the first place, or helping it be removed more quickly. When you think of aquariums on display to the general public, they have to have crystal clear water every day, so using a 10 micron sock assures the water clarity remains intact even when treatment is going on in the background. I've used such a sock a handful of times, but realistically for my reef it simply seems unnecessary.

Enter Phosban-L. With the warnings I'd read, I wondered if I was being too casual about this. I've used the product four times, in two different systems. And here are my notes:

I mixed up 100ml of Phosban-L with 200ml RODI to make 300ml solution as directed.

Recipe: 5ml of mixed solution per 20g liquid volume reduces PO4 by 1.0ppm

My total system volume is 450 liquid gallons. This accounts for the water in the display tank of the 400g, the water in the 60g Anemone Cube, and the water in the sump and refugium. I've also considered and subtracted for the sandbed and rock the displaces some water, as well as the fact that the inside of each aquarium is actually less than what the tank size is labeled. That's why I figure the water volume is 450g, not more.

450g / 20g = 22.5

22.5 x 5ml = 112.5 ml needed to drop 1.0ppm

My reef tends to be .5ppm or less. Hence, I only used 50% of the recommended dose, because I'm not trying to drop it 1.0ppm.

I dosed 60ml on three different occasions with excellent results. I happen to have a handy 60ml syringe, and pressed the plunger gradually to trickle the solution into an area of high flow in my reef over a period of two minutes. The water got cloudy initially; it cleared up within a few hours. No sock was used. I've dosed this solution at night, and I've used it during the daytime-period. I don't believe it makes a difference what time of day you use these types of products, but my preference is a night when my fish are asleep so I don't have to look at a white cloudy tank.

One 500ml bottle makes 1500mls of solution, or 25 doses for my own system. That's economical for a larger reef, for sure. People with big reef tanks will like this very much.

I also used it in my frag system to see how it would work: That system has a 60g liquid water volume and it measured .1ppm PO4 before I dosed.

60g / 20g = 3
3 x 5ml = 15ml to remove 1.0ppm

I dosed 7.5ml which was really more than was needed since the tank only measured 0.1ppm; and that particular night / the next morning my skimmer overflowed which dumped whatever was in the cup into the sump again, including whatever LaCl it had exported during the night. I cleaned up the mess, got the skimmer running anew, and tested the water a few hours later. PO4 measured 0 on my Elos test kit.

I'm very pleased to report how nicely this product worked for me, and I'm sure I'll use it again. But for the average hobbyist with a more normal-sized aquarium, I'll continue to recommend Phosphate Rx to them because there is no mixing required, and the warnings are far less ominous. All my treatments with Phosban-L have been at 50% of what is recommended (because the Po4 level wasn't high enough to justify using more per treatment). If you are trying something new I'd urge you to use it at 50% strength to familiarize yourself with how it works, and dose a couple of times over a period of a few days instead of trying to use something brand new all at once.
*** Unlike buying products from pool suppliers or hardware stores, I'm glad more products made for the aquarium are becoming available that are designed for us to use without trepidation, because our livestock continues to remain safer that way. Why risk their lives to save a few pennies or dollars? Here are the items I discussed in today's blog, all available in my shop:

Phosphate Rx: http://www.melevsreef.com/product/phosphate-rx
10 micron Sock: http://www.melevsreef.com/product/filter-sock-10-microns
Phosban-L: http://www.melevsreef.com/product/phosban-l

Happy reefing.

Reef Blog

Alkalinity matters

melev — Sat, 20 Oct 2018 10:43:47 +0000

Alkalinity matters melev Sat, 10/20/2018 - 13:43

Tank alkalinity has been somewhat low but I couldn't figure out why. My calcium reactor was full of media, the CO2 tank was full of gas, everything looked right. That's when I realized I was missing the point, that the pH measurement inside the reactor was not where it belonged. Normally it's between 6.1 to 6.5 depending on my mood, so to speak. The pH controller showed that it was 7.5 and my brain didn't click, that it wasn't 6.5... dumb mental error. In the meantime, I labeled that spot with my target numbers to avoid ever doing that again... though I'm reasonably sure that it won't happen again after this. lol

I had to clean out an inline check valve on the calcium reactor that was sealed shut with salt creep, which prevented CO2 from entering the reactor. That's been corrected, and the controller was forced to a lower set point to help get my tank's alkalinity back up to normal levels. It's been stuck at 7.5 dKH for some time, as of last night it's reading 10.5 dKH. I prefer somewhere closer to 10. When 6.5 wasn't cutting it, I dropped it to 6.1. That didn't do it either, so after some measurements I lowered it to 5.7 on the controller (which is a significant drop) but I was dealing with a faulty probe and I've got nearly 15 years experience with this reactor and just needed to solve the problem until new parts arrive.

I've burned through a brand new Elos alkalinity test kit doing some serious testing over a 24 hour period. I wanted to know a few things:
What is the pH in the reactor?
  What does the pH controller state is in the reactor? 
What is the alkalinity of the tank?
 What is the alkalinity of the effluent? 
What is the alkalinity of alkalinity solution (2 cups Soda Ash to one gallon RODI)?

And my answers after a couple of days of scrutiny: 
pH in the reactor was 6.12
pH reported by the controller was 5.8 
This means I need to replace the pH probe since it's old, and that's going to require me to buy a new pH probe holder as well.   

Alkalinity of the tank was 7.5 dKH for nearly a week, down from 9.5. 
I dosed soda ash every other day to help buffer the situation while I was trying to resolve whatever was going on.   

Alkalinity of the effluent measured 70 dKH. 
Typical effluent should measure between 19 and 35 dKH. 70 dKH was because I ran the pH down hard trying to overcome the 7.5 it seemed to be stuck at. It was visibly too low because the water in my reactor was cloudy grey, instead of clear. After I was done with testing, I raised the pH slightly and the water within has turned clear once more. 70 dKH is crazy high, and I've slowed the output from a normal trickle to a semi-decent drip to avoid raising alkalinity too much at the moment. Now that the tank is sitting at 10.5 dKH I don't want it to go higher.  

Alkalinity of the mixed Soda Ash measured over 180 dKH. 
That's why I nearly wiped out my test kit in one day. I filled the beaker with so many drops that it was full before I got the color change. I've never tested dKH of mixed solution so I was curious what it measures. If you've measured it or would like to measure yours, I'd love to hear what value you get. 

My reef is doing just fine despite the minor alkalinity drama, and all my crazy numbers. I was on a fact-checking mission this week to gather some intel and answer some questions I'd pondered about for some time.

Reef Blog

Only a reefer could do this

melev — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 18:01:11 +0000

Only a reefer could do this melev Sun, 02/18/2018 - 21:01

As hobbyists, we appreciate the need for a variety of interesting chemicals at our disposal, and usually we use them without incident. Tonight however was different, way way different. About a year ago I received a package with a few bottles of 35% peroxide. It carried all sorts of warnings on a printout about your skin turning white, but you won't die, etc. I didn't doubt their warning, but at the same time it seemed rather over the top and semi-ridiculous the way it was written. I poured a bottle or two into my 265g poly tank to clean it thoroughly, and stored the other bottle in the fridge ever since. At that time, the bottle was bulging, but it was inside a plastic bag and I honestly didn't really care. By comparison, normal peroxide we purchase is 3%.

The container was nice and clean when I was done, by the way. That stuff worked great, without incident.

Tonight I heard a large pop, and initially wasn't sure what that sound was. I wondered if it was just ice dropping in the icemaker, but it was quite a bit louder so that seemed unlikely. I looked elsewhere in the house and out front, but all seemed normal. As I headed back into the kitchen & pantry area, I stepped into some fluid that resembled water. I didn't remember dropping any ice cubes that could have melted, but I did what I'd normally do: I took a towel out and started absorbing the liquid to dry the floor. It spread weirdly, it smelled odd, and I started to worry my fridge had blown some line and perhaps this was oil or freon or whatever. It definitely didn't feel or smell like water. I washed my hands with soapy water, and called Bobby. As I've said repeatedly, everyone needs a Bobby. As we spoke, my hands started burning, and my skin had turned white across the palm and fingers. It was a sting like you'd get from bristleworms, but it active as if you were running you fingers over the bristles. Bobby had my unscrew the back of the fridge thinking this might have been a blown capacitor which contains a little fluid (possibly burnt mineral oil), but that wasn't the case. I opened up the front area under the doors as well, still trying to spot the damage. That's when we saw it dripping from the food compartment on the fridge side, so at his behest I opend the door to see more of this oily clear liquid.

At this point, my feet had begun to burn as well since when I stepped on the liquid initially my socks absorbed it and I was still wearing them during all this guesswork. Those were quickly ripped off. Inspecting the bottom shelf of the door panel, I spotted the 35% peroxide bottle on its side, and when I took it out it was completely empty. That was the sound I heard, this bottle exploding in the door for no apparent reason. I was in the livingroom, and hadn't touched the fridge and especially not that bottom shelf in some time.

The good news was that my fridge wasn't damaged and the food wasn't going to spoil. Now I just had to clean up the mess. Again, I washed my hands with pumice cleaner, trying to get down to normal looking skin and succeeding mostly. Then I had to go do the same with my feet in the tub. The floors have now been thoroughly mopped and are drying while I type up this crazy situation.

Even wearing rubber gloves with cloth backing, if anything got wet on the fabric side, I'd feel the burning sensation and I was back to rinsing skin under cold water. Is there a lesson to be learned here? Not really, it's just a freak accident. My floors are clean, and anything that made contact with the peroxide is in the washing machine. I wonder if the grout will be whiter where this happened? hehe

Reef Blog

Yes, I'm still dosing Prodibio

melev — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 10:29:03 +0000

Yes, I'm still dosing Prodibio melev Wed, 12/27/2017 - 13:29

Every few weeks, I get a message asking me if I'm dosing Prodibio and what specifically am I dosing. My preference has always been the big four: Biodigest, Bioptim, Stronti+, and Iodi+ which are all dosed back to back during the same session twice a month, on the 5th and on the 20th.

The above picture was taken with the iPhone X in Portrait Mode. I'm very impressed with the camera in my phone. :)

Coral Vits and Reefbooster I don't use as often. Typically the micro food as well as the vitamins change the water's surface tension, which makes the reef sound louder for a few hours. If you just dose Coral Vits, you get a great top down view though. When you dose Reefbooster, the water becomes opaque almost like milk. All the fish retreat to safety in their favorite spots waiting for the cloud to pass. It's best to shut off the skimmer when dosing these two items...and both of these products tend to make my skimmer overflow. I just dump it out repeatedly until it settles down again, and replace what was lost with new saltwater. Basically, a mini water change. Today, the skimmer dumped out 6g of yellowish & watery skimmate, so I replenished with some mixed saltwater I've had made up for well over two months in that tall reservoir behind my reef. Here's a picture of the skimmer overflowing non-stop. It happens to all of us, I bet you feel better now about that. lol

My system has a waste collector with a float switch. When it is full, the skimmer is shut off by my Apex to avoid a mess. I had to dump it out into a handy bucket to resume skimming, but that bucket saved me trips back and forth to the sink or toilet. Actually, I just poured it down the driveway today.

One thing I decided to do today that I never do: I tested the saltwater that has been circulating in the poly tank for the past couple of months. Usually I test it when it's mixed, and then I don't bother again. Once the container has been completely used, then I'll mix up a new batch to test. So how did this 2 month old saltwater do?

Salt Brand: Aquavitro Salinity
Aged: At least two months in a sealed container, constantly circulating
Temperature: 79.5° F
Salinity: 1.027sg
Alkalinity: 6 dKH
Calcium: 425 ppm
Magnesium: 1250 ppm
Current Water volume: 105 gallons

What I found by testing this 'old' batch of saltwater is that the alkalinity had dropped. I mixed up 5 table spoons of Soda Ash (Oven-baked Baking Soda) in a few cups of RO water, and poured it in. 5 minutes later I retested alkalinity and it measured 12 dKH. Using very loose math, it appears if I need to raise 1dKH in 100g of water, I need one tablespoon of Soda Ash. It's nice to know a measureable value instead of just guesstimating and dumping some in. I didn't intend to hit 12 dKH, but that number is totally fine for water changes on my reef since I'm only changing out 55g at a time, occasionally.

I'll probably check the alkalinity level again in a few weeks to see if it drops again.

Reef Blog

Xport Nitrate Brick has been added

melev — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 00:23:41 +0000

Xport Nitrate Brick has been added melev Thu, 11/23/2017 - 03:23

Recently I received a shipment of products from Brightwell Aquatics. I wanted to try out their Xport NO3 Brick and see if it can remove nitrate as advertised. My reef has plenty, so this is a good test. I tested nitrate last night. Elos maxes at 25ppm and it was over 25ppm; API measured over 40ppm. The brick is rated to treat 1000g, and my total water volume is about 450g including the Anemone Cube, the 400g reef and the water in the sump, factoring for displacement of all the sand and rockwork. One of these should do the job.

First thing I did was read the instructions. These indicated that I should place the brick in a bucket, and rinse it well. I decided to use tank water instead of RO water since that was a viable choice, and poured one gallon in a 3g bucket. That was more than enough to be able to submerge the brick. However, it tends to float intially because it is so light, and I'm guessing due to the porous nature of the material air is trapped within it at first. Then it said to add Microbacter 7 to the solution, so I did a measurement and it called for 90 ml for my tank's size.

I poured it in, and swirled the brick back and forth in the solution for 30 seconds to mix it well and get some all over the brick.

The instructions say to wait 24 hours, which I did. In that time all the liquid and bacteria would permeate the brick's innards. I placed that seeded brick in my sump a few minutes ago, and now we wait. I decided to put it in an area of higher flow, right after the triple baffles (post-skimmer section) which you can see in this image below.

My first inclination was to use two of these Xport bricks, but that would be 'treating' for 2000g which seemed like overkill. Plus I want to see i this works per their recommendations. I'll be testing nitrate weekly, and hopefully I'll report back that it was a success. According to the packaging this is a sulfur-based product, which makes sense, since sulfur denitrators have been around for many years to remove nitrate from a reef tank. This method sounds easier to me, less fuss and less work to maintain compared to running another reactor.

One thing I've heard is that you can't use No3Po4-X with this type of product, although I think that pertains to Marine Pure bricks? Some type of reaction makes the brick collapse, basically turning it to mush. Just an FYI if you have been using both at the same time, better doublecheck the brick and make sure it is in good shape -- especially if you used it as a skimmer stand.

Reef Blog

Cyanide-free fish?

melev — Sat, 13 May 2017 01:21:59 +0000

Cyanide-free fish? melev Sat, 05/13/2017 - 04:21

This is a very interesting story, and thus I want to park it here on my site so I can find it in the future. Being able to detect cyanide to know if a fish is at risk or not is huge.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/can-we-ever-have-cyanide-free-aquarium-fish-180963255/

Something that comes to mind, if it's being detected in their urine, why can't we add something to the water that changes color like they do to see if someone pees in a swimming pool? hehe I know, sounds crazy but that would be a great quick check, and in theory cost less than the proposed product mentioned in the article.

Over the years, I've lost my share of fish. Some deaths are mysterious, like an active Flame Angel that is eating food and swimming about, suddenly dead. My mind wants to just assume it must have been cyanide-caught, and that's why it died. If we had a way to know during the acclimation/quarantine process, that would be pretty cool. Or if the local fish stores did this test with their new arrivals, they'd be able to not only tell us "these fish are certified safe / free of cyanide" but they'd also weed out the importers and stop purchasing from them. Win win.

We can only hope.

Reef Blog

The importance of hoarding

melev — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 11:25:45 +0000

The importance of hoarding melev Mon, 04/03/2017 - 14:25

After making myself (literally) do all my water testing today on both systems, I'm quickly reminded why I prefer to only run one reef at a time. Those people that run multiple tanks or frag systems deserve heavy praise for being able to keep so many separate systems thriving. I noticed some bits of corals turning white in my reef, but I kept blaming it on shade rather than a water quality issue. Today, I ran through all the Elos test kits, twice since I have to measure the 400g reef as well as the 60g frag system.

I discovered that the alkalinity on my reef had dropped to about 7.5 dKH, which is a tad lower than I prefer to keep it. Usually it's around 9 dKH, or higher. You'd think I'd be more apt to test alkalinity more frequently since it is almost always the culprit when things go awry. Magnesium, on the other hand, is looking great at 1400ppm, something that has taken -- I don't know -- 10 months to raise where it belongs; I probably dosed 6, 7, or 8 gallons of Mg to my reef over that time period trying to get it up from 1200ppm. I'd mix up a gallon of solution and let it add to my tank every 8 hours (90ml at a time) until the container was empty, and then repeat a few weeks later. It's not a pressing element by any means, but I've learned many years ago it takes a lot to bring it up when it is depleted. For the time being, I won't need to dose that for a duration because it takes a decent amount of time for it to deminish. Perhaps I'll find that dosing 180ml once a week will suffice, but that's just a WAG at the time of this writing.

Back to the Alkalinity. The simplest solution when running a Calcium Reactor is to lower the melting point of the media. It was at pH 6.6, so I lowered it to 6.2 for now. The flow rate will remain at the constant trickle I've used for 13 years. And when more of the remaining media is consumed in the coming weeks, I'll replace that with some fresh Reborn calcium reactor media and raise the setpoint to pH 6.5 and test weekly.

The frag system was badly neglected. My dosing container had run dry in all three compartments and I needed to replenish them. The tank started losing some corals, and cyano began to take hold. I did clean out the triple compartment dosing reservoir and replenished alkalinity, calcium and magnesium solutions and made sure all three dosing pumps were dispensing properly. And for the past couple of weeks, that tank looked worse. LPS seemed unbothered, but SPS were all but gone. The fish seemed normal, and I was busy with a huge project for my work, and the system took a back seat.

About a week ago, it was clear I was going to have to clean out the tank of the cyano situation and that's when it dawned on me that I could do a video about treating the tank with RedCyano Rx. I've written articles about Chemi-Clean in the past, and have provided the proper steps when trying to erradicate cyanobacteria on the product page I sell from, but everyone loves to see a video these days. I let the tank fester more, and then filmed what it looked like.

By now I'm sure you are wondering why I entitled this blog the way I did above. And what about all that powdery stuff in the picture? After measuring all the testable elements in the frag system, I quickly discerned that I don't need any alkalinity or magnesium whatsoever for the next week or longer. For those of you that like numbers, alkalinity had risen to 18 dKH and magnesium measured 1450 ppm. Calcium on the other hand was crazy low at 200 ppm. I changed the dosage rate for calcium, doubling the amount being added every eight hours. The pH of this tank has been too high, but with that high alkalinity I'm not surprised. That number will come down in the next few days to the typical average I've come to expect.

It was then that I thought about physically dosing calcium to the frag tank and soda ash to the reef to correct the deficiencies now rather than letting this situation resolve itself over the course of days. I have all kinds of products on hand, including these jars by Fritz. Originally I wanted to offer these products in my shop as a way to mix up 1-gallon of solution at a time, but the jars don't contain the correct weight of powder necessary to do so. But when your tank is missing something, you can definitely follow the directions and start counting out teaspoons of these additives to hit those desired target numbers.

I had Sodium carbonate as well as Sodium bi-carbonate on hand. After double checking my memory with a quick google search, I used the Sodium carbonate (Soda Ash) to mix up enough power in a big cup of RO water to raise the 400g's alkalinity to 8.5 dKH. pH rose quickly from 8.05 to 8.42 initially, then dropped back down gradually for the evening. 8.4 isn't a risky number in a reef, and if anything the corals that weren't doing well likely were happy to get a boost of alk today.

Next I mixed up the Calcium chloride to raise Ca back up where it belonged, around 350 ppm. I only poured in half the solution in an area of high flow, and waited about six hours before adding the other half of that batch.

I did some other reef-related duties today, including cleaning three different skimmers and collected about 45g of RO/DI water for a big water change coming up for the 60g frag system currently being treated with RedCyano Rx. It was nice to work on my tanks today, and just feel like things are being cared for better... but I really must force myself to test weekly like clockwork to avoid such unpleasant surprises.

I'm glad that I save everything, even products that seem unlikely to be useful. These jars would normally be woefully small for my 400g reef and require that I have several of each type to actually accomplish anything, but if you hoard even the small stuff, it ends up being exactly what you need on a rainy day like today. :)

And that's why I recommend you hoard stuff too.

Reef Blog

Video: How to dose Phosphate Rx

melev — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:38:19 +0000

Video: How to dose Phosphate Rx melev Mon, 03/13/2017 - 03:38

I've been using Phosphate Rx for a decade, and it's my preferred product to keep PO4 levels under control. No GFO for me. I've mentioned it many times, but decided "I guess I need to do a video about this product after all." I do realize I could have explained the process in about sixty seconds because it's that simple, but I wanted this to be a fun video. Hope you liked the flashback.

Purchase Phosphate Rx here: https://melevsreef.com/reefshop/dry-goods/additives-and-solutions/phosphate-rx
Purchase 4" 10 micron filter socks here: https://melevsreef.com/reefshop/dry-goods/media/filter-sock-10-microns

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